The US government has quietly shelved plans to add Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, memory chip maker ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), and over 100 other companies to its trade blacklist, according to two people familiar with the matter. The postponement is intended to avoid further inflaming tensions between Washington and Beijing.
The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security had already cleared the expanded Entity List through an interagency review late last year, targeting at least 75 Chinese entities involved in advanced semiconductors, chipmaking equipment, and AI models. But Deputy Commerce Secretary for Industry and Security Jeffrey Kessler has been stalling the rollout since late 2025, worried about a further deterioration in US-China relations. The result: the Entity List hasn’t been updated in eight months — the longest pause in over a decade.
Beyond chips and AI, dozens of Chinese companies were also set to be named for reselling restricted Nvidia chips to Chinese universities, or for supplying drones to Russia that were recovered in Poland last September. US officials have accused DeepSeek of assisting military and intelligence operations, and of trying to evade US sanctions by buying advanced chips through Southeast Asian shell companies. Anthropic and OpenAI have also warned this year that DeepSeek is actively trying to steal their models’ capabilities.